Artist Statement

June 9 – August 21, Santa Mònica Art Centre. Public Event.

Keywords: Machine Learning, Memory, Pandemic, Moving Images

This is a series of animated images presented by a machine learning model based on a dataset that the artist collected dusk photographs taken by people worldwide during the pandemic.

Imaginary Sunset is an AI-generated video that investigates how technology interprets collective memory experience. The machine learning model generates a set of fictional landscape pictures using a dataset of sunset and dusk photographs taken by individuals around the globe on social media platforms in 2020. It explored how artificial intelligence is being used to interrogate between reality and fake and is supposed to recreate memories about the pandemic lockdown from a machinery perspective. The dusk landscape is a typical and commonplace photographic subject. Even so, in the midst of the worldwide pandemic, it takes on a significance that cuts over cultural and political boundaries, as though as a symbol of humanity observing the times. https://nolanh.net/Imaginary-Sunset

• Xuanyang Huang (HK/CH) is a media artist, researcher and educator based in Guangzhou, China. Ranging from computer graphics, digital photography, generative art and performance, his art practices explore the artistic potential of artificial intelligence, especially in association with memory, and the hybrid forms and narrative in computational audio-visual art. Huang’s artworks have been showcased and exhibited in New York, Zurich, Hong Kong, Shanghai and other countries and regions. He is a lecturer and thesis supervisor at Roy Ascott Technoetic Art Studio, Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. He received MA and MFA from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and later was a resident at the Transcultural Collaboration programme at Zurich University of Arts (ZHdK). https://nolanh.net/